Well a couple of weekends ago it seemed that Google shuffled the pack again and the usual bleating on SEO forums followed – “I’ve dropped from the first page to the 20th page” etc. It seems to me that Google have a real focus on long term link building and have tactics in place to ensure that the quick hit link builders, who see success in the short term, are being hammered eventually as their links are re-evaluated.

So the question occured to me how do you protect yourself from these regular updates? The aim is to have established links from indexed pages with useful & unique content, that matches the link text and the target page. What better way to do this that to control the lot. OK, so it’s a long term strategy but with more and more tools available it’s never been easier. What would you give for a network of 20-30 indexed pages with a google page rank giving exclusive “votes” to your site? This could be a reality within a year, even 6 months and it won’t be you bleating on the forums!

Bing.com - Microsoft's new Search Engine

Microsoft’s new search at Bing.com is apparently going to help people make better decisions when they search online. Because of this Microsoft has deemed Bing to be a ‘Decision Engine’ as it’s being touted as helping customers go beyond search in dealing with information overload.

So what is Bing? Well first and foremost Bing is a search engine. It’s difficult to tell if it’s any different than its predecessor or any of its competitors, as on the surface it behaves very similarly. After performing some testing, to understand the implications on sites I work on and how they would rank, I did notice there was a small variation in the results compared to Google, but nothing I could call significant. I noticed there were far fewer listed sites than Google but then again this isn’t any different to it’s predecessor.

OK, so what is different about Bing? According to Microsoft, Bing is focused on four key areas; making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition and finding a local business. These claims are all very well and good but my initial testing couldn’t prove any of them. I can’t say I understand exactly how the focus on these key areas would take effect, but I could not find anything to demonstrate these claims through the search engine results pages (SERPs) being returned.

Obviously Bing is still in it’s infancy and making any sort of judgement about it now could prove premature, although I welcome competition in the search engine market. The lack of genuine competition creates inherent problems which restricts how we are able to use the web. Time will tell if Bing.com becomes just another search engine or whether it can live up to its hype and offer users something genuinely different – which if it could might allow it to take some of Google’s market share.

Google SERP

People who aren’t in the industry don’t usually pay too much attention to the structure of the Google results page and refer to Google Adwords as “those ones down the right hand side”.  Well if you want to know a bit more about how to get your business listing in “those ones” here is an outline about what Google Adwords is all about.

On a Google results page as well as the natural listings there are also paid for sponsored links. These appear at the top of the results page above the natural listings and down the right hand side in a seperatecolumn. To get these adverts linking to your site you will need to set up an account to use Google Adwords.

The concept is a simple one – you bid on words and phrases in an auction and the highest bids appear at the top of the sponsored links. The highest bid isn’t just about money though. There are two other important factors that Google consider – the Quality Score and the Click Through Rate (CTR).

Every time you bid for a word or phrase Google will compare this with the content on your landing page and work out a Quality Score. The published score is between 1-10 and usually 7 or more is considered good.

The third factor – the CTR – is a percentage of people who click on the advert after it is displayed (clicks/impressions). It is slightly more difficult to say what you should be aiming for here as expected CTRs will vary greatly depending on the phrase and the market. Our ecommerce clients would accept 5%, would be pleased with 10% and would be very pleased with 25% or more. However with some terms much less can be acceptable.

Effectively what this means is if you have a high Quality Score and good CTRs then you will pay less for your clicks than competitors who have poor quality scores and CTRs.